Dany-Robert Dufour

In his book "La situation désespéré du présent me remplit d'espoir (The Present Situation Fills Me with Hope), 2016, Dany-Robert Dufour tries to illustrate how the Occidental madness, founded on the "will to always have more" (what the Greeks called pleonexia, greed), has resulted in nothing but provoking its contrary strife for purity. Which could be transformed into a new madness of "fundamentalist" expression, like for instance jihadism, where the strife for a purity guaranteed by the original union with God, can alter into absolute ignominy of spectacular deranged massacres of "infidels". This second madness leads in turn to a third madness, that of "madness of identity" which can cause civil wars in the search for "alien elements" to exterminate.

L'individu qui vient … après le libéralisme ("The Individual that Appears … after liberalism"), published in 2011, is a new step in Dufour's work. He considers that he has sufficiently deconstructed the liberal anthropology in his previous works and is now to enter a constructive line of work in his research for new possible axioms for a real civilizational policy.

In La cité perverse – libéralisme et pornographie, 2009 (Perverted Society - Liberalism and Pornography) Dufour attempts to display that the economical and financial crisis starting in October 2009 has provided us with at least one advantage: it has revealed the perverted mechanisms regulating the function of today's society.

More generally this book describes and analyses – one year before the big Financial crisis of 2007–08 – the potentially destructive effects of (neo)liberalism, not only on the market economy, but also and particularly on other fields of human expression such as politics, use of symbols, semiotics, psychology... And not to disregard what contains everything: how to handle one's own living.

Dany-Robert Dufour (born in 1947) is a French philosopher, professor of educational sciences at the university Paris-VIII. He teaches regularly abroad, particularly in Latin America. His main focus is symbolic processes (specially désymbolisation) with relevance to language philosophy, political philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a frequent participant in cooperative artistic activities with music, literature or theatre.

De Sade had so well demonstrated how a world subject to the principle of absolute egoism would appear that he was to be imprisoned for 27 years and his books to be concealed in the archives of libraries for two centuries. Dufour investigates de Sade's return, first masked, then overtly, during the 20th century and the world which will become the result of this. He also tries to indicate some ways to escape this (a)moral trap.

In the book Le Divin Marché, la révolution culturelle libérale ("The Divine Market, the Liberal Cultural Revolution") Dufour tries to point out that we have come under the grip of a new victorious religion: the Divine Market, functioning on a simple but terribly efficient principle which Bernard Mandeville described in The Fable of the Bees in 1704: it is the vices (i.e., the self-regarding actions of men) which alone, by means of inventions and the circulation of capital in connection with luxurious living, stimulate society into action and progress. This "miracle" is produced by "divine providence", what Adam Smith was to call "The Invisible Hand".